Current Synthetic and Systems Biology
Open Access

Abstract

Embryogenesis: How to get the Picture?

Corentin Spriet, Dave Trinel and Jean-François Bodart

Complex and specifically orchestrated process, embryogenesis can be at hand through different methodologies, where microscopy took the main role. At first, photonic microscopy enabled to describe the different morphological events of embryogenesis and provided normal tables of development for many organisms, from marine invertebrates to lower vertebrates such as amphibian. Noticeably, Differential Interference Contrast (DIC) microscopy, also called Nomarksi Interference Contrast, brought deeper insights in spatiotemporal descriptions like for fertilization in sea urchin and gastrulation in Drosophila. To go further, process for image analysis were developed to gain the understanding of embryogenesis events in 4D. One can mention the development of methodology and algorithms to automatically analyze the segmentation of ascidians notochord cells, in order to get an improvement of cell segmentation’s analysis derived from DIC, and to provide comprehensive local motility maps. Nevertheless, DIC is infeoded in that case to animal models exhibiting transparency during their early development or organogenesis.